The opportunity to personalize features in a mobile vehicle is ever increasing as the automobile is being transformed into a communications and entertainment platform as well as a transportation platform. Current projections indicate that some type of telematics unit to provide wireless communication and location-based services will be installed in a majority of new American cars by 2006. These services may be accessed through interfaces such as voice-recognition computer applications, touch-screen computer displays, computer keyboards, or a series of buttons on the dashboard or console of a vehicle.
Currently, telematics service call centers, in-vehicle compact disk (CD) or digital video display (DVD) media, web portals, and voice-enabled phone portals provide various types of location services, including driving directions, stolen vehicle tracking, traffic information, weather reports, restaurant guides, ski reports, road condition information, accident updates, street routing, landmark guides, and business finders.
For example, traffic and driving directions may be accessed through a voice portal that uses incoming number identification to generate location information based on the area code or prefix of the phone number, or to access location information stored in a user's profile associated with the phone number. Users may be prompted to enter more details through a voice interface. Other examples are web and wireless portals that offer location-based services such as maps and driving directions where the user enters both a start and end addresses. Some of these services may have a voice interface.
The location-based services described above and current telematics services available in vehicles do not provide a way by which a user may send a series of voice messages to several different recipients by speaking the recipients' names and correlated messages into a phone for delivery after all the messages are spoken and the user has terminated the connection with the automated voice messaging system. Additionally, this service is not available on any home or business based voice messaging systems.
It is desirable, therefore, to provide a method, computer usable medium and system that overcomes the limitations described above by allowing a user to send a series voice messages to several recipients during one system interaction.